Martin Fone's Blog, page 221
July 25, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Seventy
Every gin needs a back story in order to elbow its way through the crowd of competitors that have been spawned by the ginaissance. Needle Blackforest Distilled Dry Gin is no different. I came upon a bottle at the Duty Free shop in Schipol Airport, my eye drawn to its dark green bell-shaped bottle with a distinctive diamond-shaped label with a stylised motif of pine needles. It was rebranded in February 2019 and the designers have made a good job of giving the bottle a contemporary feel.
It is a German gin, distilled by the Bimmerle distillery in Achern, a town in the south-west of Germany and, crucially for this story, is at the northern end of the Black Forest. The gin is supposed to be inspired by the forest and, in particular, the specific and distinctive smells to be encountered whilst wandering through the woods. I suppose I will have to take their word for it as I have never had a walk through the Black Forest and I suspect many who have drunk the gin will say the same. It smacks of marketing spin with a dash of pretension.
The smell and taste picture that the distillers are trying to conjure up allows them to introduce their distinguishing botanical, picea abies, better known as the common or Norwegian spruce. Yes, it is the one that we stick up and decorate just before Christmas and whose needles we find in unusual places for the next six months. What better use for these pesky needles than to put them in the distillation mix for a gin? It is the smell of the needles, so the blurb says, that is so redolent of the Black Forest region.
The other botanicals that make up the mix, there are eleven in all, include juniper, lavender, ginger, lemons and oranges providing the citrus notes, cinnamon and allspice. For those who can count you will realise that three are missing. These are the secret botanicals whose identity the manufacturers will not disclose. The recipe upon which the gin is based dates back to 1799, according to the label at the back of the bottle.
One of the ancillary benefits of exploring gins from other countries is that it allows you to brush up your language skills. My knowledge of German is rudimentary but with the help of an on-line translator I have managed to unlock the contents of the blurb on the back of the label. In truth it is not very revelatory but it confirms that the basis of distillation is single-batch and that “the spicy air of the Black Forest and the use of native hand picked botanicals such as spruce needles – are the crowning glory of our Needle Gins”.
The top is an artificial cork with Needle and the spruce needles stamped on. On removing the top the aroma is distinctive, juniper is in there somewhere and there is a dash of citrus but the smell is predominantly of pine needles. In the mouth the spirit seems well-balanced with the spruce and juniper blending surprisingly well. The citrus elements seem to hide in the background, though, and the aftertaste is dry and spicy.
At 40% ABV it makes for a pleasant drink but I felt it needed some help by way of a quality tonic to bring it to life. You could distinguish all of the components and the overall impression it left was fine but it seemed a bit of a monotone production. There was little in the way of a surprise as you explored the gin in your mouth or swallowed it. Perhaps I’m becoming too picky.
Until the next time, cheers!
July 24, 2019
Book Corner – July 2019 (4)
The Sum of Things – Olivia Manning
This is the final book of the so-called Levant Trilogy and was published posthumously in 1980 as Manning had rather inconveniently died. This probably explains the rather loose and rather unsatisfactory ending.
The book picks up the stories of Harriet and Guy Pringle and the young army officer, Simon Boulderstone, where they were left at the end of The Battle Lost and Won. Harriet decided at the last minute not to board the evacuation ship bound for England that Guy had wanted her to take. It was a good job, too, as it was torpedoed. Instead she joined a couple of women friends, in all senses if you read between the lines, and travels to Damascus. She doesn’t tell Guy of her change of plan, feeling the need to get away from their dying relationship. Guy assumes she is on the ship and assuming that she has died, has to come to terms with his loss.
He does this by taking on as a project bucking up Simon Boulderstone who was seriously injured at the end of the last book and is languishing in the Plegics ward. Simon recovers sufficiently to get back to duty but is frustrated that the severity of his injuries means that he cannot pursue death or glory on the front line. Harriet’s absence and presumed death encourages her friends to criticise Guy for his treatment of her, barbs which clearly hurt as he reacts rather defensively to them.
Harriet’s travels around the Middle East are entertaining, not least the description of the religious ceremony in Jerusalem. But there she meets the only survivor of the evacuation ship, the coincidences are astonishing and truly Anthony Powellite in the way enable the plot to move on, and realises that Guy must think her dead. Despite her disillusionment with her marriage, Harriet decides to return to Cairo to be reunited with him. Tellingly, although Guy is overcome with emotion when he sees Harriet alive, he still goes out that evening, missing the celebratory dinner, to give a lecture to his students on self-determination.
Unlike the Balkan Trilogy and the first two volumes of this trilogy, the Pringles are no longer in imminent danger of invasion and being forced to flee from the enemy. The tide of the war has turned, the North African campaign won, and the Allies are now pursuing their foes through Italy. There is a sense that the war and events have left the motley collection of British ex-pats, some of those we have met earlier pop up from time to time like Adrian Pratt, Bill Castlebar, Lady Angela Hooper, Dobson, and Edwina, rather high and dry, leaving them to reconcile themselves to their redefined lot in life.
For the Pringles this means continuing their unsatisfactory and disappointing marriage which, as Harriet notes, “in an imperfect world, was making do with what one had chosen”. Castlebar dies of typhoid, leaving his estranged wife and mistress, Angela, to fight over the body, the latter eventually settling for the role of a carer. Pratt commits suicide, again a victim of Guy’s lack of human empathy and Simon, as well as losing his military ambitions, also allows his intense feeling of grief for his brother, hero and role model, Hugo, die “like a face disappearing under water”.
Despite Guy being an insufferable prig and Harriet being a fool for putting up with him, the reader is left with a desire to find out what became of them. That is why the coda is disappointing and Manning’s death a tragedy. Still, I enjoyed the trilogy, entertaining and well-paced making it a fairly undemanding read. If you are looking for something to get your teeth into on your hols, you could do worse.
July 23, 2019
Fart Of The Week (5)
In Clay County in Missouri a man suspected of possessing controlled substances aka drugs was on the run from officers from the curiously and anomalously named Liberty Police Department. As the officers had dogs the unnamed suspect sensibly hid in the undergrowth.
As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his 1781 Letter to the Royal Academy about farting, “it is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind”. It was at this point that the suspect’s bowels started troubling him, so much so that he let out a loud and prolonged fart, clearly one uncontrolled substance about his person.
The noise was such that the police were immediately able to sniff him out and arrest him. Happily, the police were able to report that no one was injured during the arrest.
I suppose it will take a while for the suspect to live that one down but at least it should guarantee him a single cell.
July 22, 2019
Double Your Money – Part Forty Four
Lord Gordon-Gordon (c1840 – 1874)
There is nothing like a British Lord to impress the Americans and Lord Gordon-Gordon, who claimed to be a descendant of an ancient line of Scottish kings, was nothing like a British Lord. It is likely that he was the result of an illicit liaison between a clergyman from somewhere in the North and his maid. Little is known about his early life but one thing that is certain is that he was a plausible con man.
He first surfaced in London around 1869, posing as a wealthy Scottish landowner called Lord Glencairn. Introduced to London society by a Scottish clergyman by the name of Simpson, Glencairn secured credit from jewellers and tapped up some individuals whose trust he had gained for loans. By the time he judged that it was prudent to move on, Glencairn did what all accomplished fraudsters do and scarpered, leaving behind substantial debts and swindling jewellers, Marshall and Son of £25,000.
Surfacing in Minneapolis in 1871, he assumed the identity of Lord Gordon-Gordon and deposited $40,000 in a bank to establish his credentials, presumably the residue of his London caper. Introduced to Colonel Loomis, the Land Commissioner of the North West Pacific Railways which was seeking capital to fund its further expansion westwards, Gordon explained he was interested in buying up huge tracts of railroad land in Minnesota upon which to settle tenants displaced from his Scottish estates.
Seeing dollar signs in their eyes, Loomis and his fellow directors spared no expense in wooing Gordon, funding an all-expenses paid tour across the railroad lands, first-class of course, along with daily expenses and the use of a valet and secretary. Having cost the company $45,000, Gordon announced that he needed to East to arrange the transfer of funds. Naturally, his gullible hosts provided him with letters of introduction to the great and good of New York.
In New York Gordon set about planning an even more audacious scam, again involving railway companies. Introduced to the editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, he learnt that the management of the Erie Railroad Company were involved in a bitter battle for control of the company. Gordon told Greeley that he represented a consortium of foreign investors who had secretly bought 60,000 shares in the company and were planning to replace the Board.
Greeley hot footed it round to Jay Gould who had his own plans for the company with the news of a rival bid. On March 2, 1872 Gould paid Gordon a visit and proposed a deal whereby Gordon and his partners could choose directors but Gould was left in control of the company. Feigning reluctance, Gordon demanded $500,000 in cash and securities as a sign of good faith, promising not to spend a cent of it until the deal was done.
Gould agreed, paying over $160,000 in cash and the rest in stock. Surprisingly, Gordon did not run off with his ill-gotten gains but, less surprisingly, began to sell some of the shares. Gould got wind of what Gordon was up to and ordered brokers not to accept the trades. He then told Gordon the deal was off and demanded the money back. Gordon returned all the money but there was a deficit of around $150,000 in shares. Gould had Gordon arrested on April 9, 1872 for receiving money on false pretences.
At the trial Gordon feigned complete indifference, playing on his noble birth and giving the names of a number of the English nobility who would vouch for him. Unfortunately for Gordon, Gould sent telegrams to his referees, all of whom denied knowing Gordon. Out on bail and seeing a stretch inside looming, Gordon skipped over the border to Canada.
Tracked down to Fort Garry in Manitoba in the summer of 1873, Gordon was kidnapped by a posse from Minnesota eager to secure Gould’s $25,000 bounty, bundled into a wagon and was almost returned to American justice. But the Canadian police stopped them at the border and threw the kidnappers themselves into jail. This kicked off a serious diplomatic incident between the US and Canada, only resolved by interventions at the highest level.
Gordon was still at liberty but Gould’s reward still stood. Another gang, this time accompanied by police from Toronto, tracked him down to a cottage in the Manitoba village of Headingly. On August 1, 1874 Gordon was arrested.
But even then he was able to evade justice. According to the testimony of a Toronto policeman, Alexander Munro, Gordon asked for time to get dressed, made a rush for the bedroom and produced a revolver. In the ensuing scuffle the gun went off and Munro “saw blood coming out of his left ear; that was the first I noticed; afterward saw the wound in his right temple; I believe he was dying fast and was dead immediately”.
And that was the end of Lord Gordon-Gordon. But who he really was, no one knows to this day.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
July 21, 2019
Lake Of The Week
The search for that perfect spot for a selfie which will make your friends envious and become a sensation on social media knows no bounds. On the face of it, a lake close by the Russian city of Novosibirsk looks to be the ideal place for that perfect selfie. Because of the quality of its bright blue water, it is known as the Novosibirsk Maldives.
It even has its own Instagram account but the Russian authorities, spoilsports that they are, have revealed that all is not quite what it seems. The intense blueness of the water, they say, is caused by calcium oxides diluted in the shallow waters, the type of stuff found in quicklime and, although not poisonous, has a high acidity content. Rather than a natural miracle, the Moscow Times notes, the lake “is an ash dump into which CHPP-5 (a coal plant owned by the Siberian Generating Company) is dumping waste”.
Lovely.
But some people are not deterred and the oxygen of publicity has encouraged more brave, foolhardy souls to take a dip. Some report that the water tastes a bit sour and looks like chalk. One person who went for a dip seemed to confirm the warnings that the water may cause an allergic reaction by reporting that the following morning “his legs turned slightly red and itched for two days” but that didn’t put him off.
After all, as the German poet, Rilke, once noted, “no great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger”.
July 20, 2019
Vandal Of The Week
It may be my age but there’s nothing like settling down in the evening with a good book. The expectation is that the volume is complete and woe betide anyone who spoils my enjoyment by spoiling the plot.
As a fan of detective fiction, I was intrigued to learn of a curious case which would have exercised the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot. The book ripper is on the loose in the Kent resort town of Herne Bay.
Staff in the Demelza Hospice Care charity bookshop began to notice earlier this year that some of their books on their shelves had a page and in some instances all of their pages ripped horizontally, rendering them useless. Since April the ripper’s activities have increased and around 15 books a week are being damaged.
This strange vandal has also targeted the town’s library, damaging some 20 paperbacks, evading the CCTV cameras in the process.
The hunt for the book ripper is now on, involving the local police, and charity staff and librarians are said to be on high alert. It is a strange form of literary criticism, for sure.
There’s nowt so queer as folk.
July 19, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (240)?…
Break one’s duck
Cricket is one of those marmite games, you either love it or hate it. For those living outside the influence of what was the British Empire, it is nigh on incomprehensible. How can you play for five days and sometimes not get a result? How does leg before wicket work? The rule seems to be designed to perplex all but the most ardent students of the game. But for chaps of my vintage there is nothing better than spending a warm summer’s day, glass in hand, listening to the sound of willow striking leather.
When I turned my hand to the game, I was no great shakes with the bat and my time at the crease rarely troubled the scorer. Being out without scoring, a duck in cricketing parlance, is an occupational hazard even for the professional cricketer. A pair, a contraction of a pair of spectacles, is achieved when the batsman is out for nought in each of the two innings. The Australian batsman, Mark Waugh, recorded four successive ducks in the second and third tests against Sri Lanka in 1992, earning him the nickname of Audi from his teammates – think of the logo of their sponsor at the time. One more duck and he would have been called Olympics.
Breaking your duck means, in cricket, scoring your first runs and in more general parlance, achieving for the first time something you have been striving for. But why is scoring nought in the game of cricket called a duck?
It is all to do with the similarity of the symbol of a nought and the shape of the egg of a duck. Charles Reade explained the reference in a passage from his controversial book, Very Hard Cash, serialised in Charles Dicken’s periodical, All The Year Round, and published in 1863; “Alfred told her “the round 0” which had yielded to “the duck’s-egg” and was becoming obsolete, meant the cipher set by the scorer against a player’s name, who is out without making a run”. What outraged the great British public was not Reade’s explanation of the vocabulary of cricket but his strong attack on the current asylum system. Sales of the periodical plummeted and at the end of the serialisation Dickens was forced to append a note distancing the periodical from Reade’s views to arrest the slump.
George H Selkirk summed it all up rather succinctly in his Guide to the Cricket Ground, published in 1867, when he defined duck’s egg thus: “when a batsman makes 0 in an innings. If he makes one run he has “broken his duck’s egg; ” and if he makes 0 in each innings he is said to have made a “pair of spectacles.”” Inevitably, duck’s egg was abbreviated to duck, as a forgiving correspondent to British Sports and Pastimes noted in 1868; “…his fear of a “duck” – as by a pardonable contraction from duck-egg, a nought is called in cricket-play..”
So popular was cricket as a sport in the late nineteenth century that its terminology began to drift into everyday speech and assume a wider meaning. In particular, breaking your duck came to mean achieving something for the first time as this extract from a report of proceedings of a meeting at the Rotherhithe Vestry in the South London Press of July 7, 1894 shows; “Mr Stuart was glad to find Mr Payne had broken his duck’s egg at the Council (Laughter)”. I can’t help thinking that the demise of the local press will deprive future generations of such gems in years to come.
And we will be all the poorer for reports of spats which might not trouble the editors of our national papers like this rather strange altercation between two Alfreds, reported in Sheffield’s Evening Telegraph and Star on September 26, 1888. A Mr Wilmott was playing a game of billiards when Alfred Webdale came in and called him “The Baron”. Being a man of strong democratic sentiments, Wilmott took extreme umbrage at this piece of badinage and drew his pistol, which he happened to have about his person. The report goes on, “Fortunately, Mr Wilmott’s aim with the pistol was not equal to that with the cue, and by Webdale ducking his head beneath the table, the infuriated marksman scored a “duck”. Alas, poor Wilmott was brought before the magistrates.
To the Americans, the game of cricket is a closed book, although they do have baseball which in my experience, I have been to a number of games, makes cricket look exciting. But they do have an expression lay an egg, which sprang up in the 1920s, particularly in show-business circles, and means something which comes to nothing or crashes and burns. One of the most famous headlines containing the phrase appeared in the theatrical magazine, Variety, when commenting on the Wall Street crash in 1929, exclaimed “Wall Street lays an egg”. Is it too fanciful to think that the egg in question is a duck’s and that it shows cricket’s ability to permeate the subconscious of every English-speaking nation?
Be that as it may, I for one am looking forward to lots of Australian ducks this summer.
July 18, 2019
Rembrandt’s Cyclops
So important is Rembrandt van Rijn’s Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Bannick Cocq aka The Night Watch to Amsterdam’s Rijkmuseum that the authorities are proposing from July to restore it under public gaze, a curious form of watching paint dry. Completed in 1642, it is a colossal piece and rightly considered to be one of the painter’s finest works.
Commissioned in around 1639 by the company to hang in the banquet hall of their newly constructed Meeting Hall and funded by subscriptions from Cocq and seventeen of his comrades, their names appear on a shield, a later addition dating to 1715, it defied the conventions of group portraiture by adding a strong sense of movement and drama to the composition. Clever use of light and shade leads the viewer’s eye to the principal characters at the centre of the picture. It is laden with symbolism and a dash of humour, the half-seen face of a male character, perhaps Rembrandt himself, lurking in the background and peering over the shoulder of a top-hatted and moustachioed contributor.
Its sheer size was to cause difficulties. When, in 1715, the picture was moved to the Amsterdam Town Hall, it would not fit in the space allocated to it between two columns. The answer to the predicament was blindingly obvious; trim all four sides of the painting, losing along the way two of the figures on the left-hand side, the top of the arch, the balustrade and the edge of a step. This done, the picture fitted perfectly but this piece of artistic vandalism destroyed the symmetry of the composition and removed two of the props Rembrandt had used to enhance the impression of forward movement.
Taking commissions was a double-edged sword for Rembrandt. For an impecunious painter it could guarantee welcome income but in return you needed to pander to the tastes and sensibilities of your paymasters. Amsterdam’s new Town Hall, now the Royal Palace, was built in 1655 and Govert Flinck, a better-connected painter who had had the sense to marry the daughter of a director of the powerful Dutch East India Company, was commissioned to paint some pictures to adorn the walls. But in 1660 Flinck rather inconveniently died, leaving unfinished his homage to the Batavian leader, Gaius Julius or Claudius Civilis.
The subject matter was a seminal moment in proto-Dutch history, a feast, in which Civilis gathered together the tribal chiefs and soldiers and, according to the Roman historian, Tacitus, roused them to rebel against their Roman oppressors, binding them “with barbarous rites and strange forms of oaths”. Whilst the rebellion, in 69 CE, was initially successful, superior Roman military muscle forced the Batavi to sue for peace.
The Batavi, hailing from southern end of what is now the Netherlands, were seen by the Dutch as their ancestors and gave their name to the hub of the Dutch Eastern trading operations, Batavia, now modern-day Jakarta in Indonesia. Their uprising could be viewed as the first signs of the emergence of the now thriving, prosperous Dutch nation and a picture commemorating Civilis, who had served in the Roman army for 25 years, losing an eye in battle before turning rebel, appealed to the burgeoning sense of Dutch nationalism.
In 1661 Rembrandt was commissioned to pick up from where Flinck had left off but, instead, he started from scratch with his own radical and dramatic reinterpretation of this pivotal moment. The resulting The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, shows Civilis as a mountain of a man, a strong and powerful leader, dressed in lavish costume with striking headgear, sword in hand. His fierce stare shows his steely determination, Rembrandt’s choice of a frontal profile emphasising Civilis’ missing eye.
The rebels, their rather crude and primitive forms highlighting their barbarism, show their intent by crossing swords rather than shaking hands. Rembrandt’s use of light is clever. It shines from the table, the source obscured by figures in the foreground, giving the figure of Civilis an almost messianic quality. The picture is truly astonishing and, in my opinion, is right up there amongst the best of his work.
His putative paymasters, alas, did not agree. At five and a half metres square it was Rembrandt’s largest work and whilst it was hung, it soon fell into disfavour. The city officials probably found Civilis’ piercing eye unsettling and the unconventional portrayal of the scene and its primitivism disturbing. Rembrandt almost certainly wasn’t paid for the work and to add insult to injury, it was returned to him and he had the indignity of seeing Jürgen Ovens complete Flinck’s version, which adorned the City Hall walls instead.
What do you do with such a large painting? Taking a leaf out of the book of the City fathers, Rembrandt cut it down to a more manageable size, it is now just 196 by 309 centimetres in size, a mere snapshot of the original, repainted parts, dampening down some of the colours in Civilis’ garb along the way, and sold it. By 1782 it had found its way to Sweden and now hangs in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum. It came to London in 2014 as part of the National Gallery’s excellent Rembrandt: The Late Works exhibition.
Is it too fanciful to think that the figure peering over the shoulder of the man with a top hat in the Night Watch, one eye visible, is a nod to the first Dutch hero, Civilis? I wonder.
July 17, 2019
Book Corner – July 2019 (3)
Journey Into Fear – Eric Ambler
It is always good not to get set in one’s ways. I don’t usually read thrillers but a combination of a BBC Radio 4 serialisation of his works, a snippet of which I heard, and a good deal from Penguin Modern Classics encouraged me to pick up this book. Written in 1940 and imbued with the atmosphere of the phony war stage of the Second World War where major conflict has not broken out, where alliances are still somewhat fluid and both sides are jockeying for position.
Stuck in the middle of all of this is a British engineer, Howard Graham, who has been working on an important munitions project in Istanbul (or Stambul, as it was known at the time) on behalf of the Turkish government. On returning to his hotel on the eve of his long-awaited return home and after an evening out at a seedy night club where he was conscious of being stared at by a man, he is astonished to find an intruder who takes several pot shots at him. Graham is only slightly injured and thinks that his assailant was an opportunity thief whom he had disturbed.
The scales fall off Graham’s eyes when he is advised by Colonel Haki of the Turkish Intelligence that this was no ordinary thief but an assassin. So important is the project on which he has been working that the Nazis are determined to kill him, thus delaying the upgrade of the Turkish military capabilities until the following spring at least. To protect Graham, his travel plans are changed and he is advised to sail to Genoa in an Italian freighter. Despite having been told that his fellow passengers have been vetted, not all of them are all that they may seem. Part of the essence of the book is Graham’s struggle to work out who he can trust and who is out to get him.
And Ambler has assembled a motley collection of characters. Each is skilfully drawn and there is enough ambiguity in each of their characters to keep the reader and, of course, Graham guessing as to their true colours and motivation. There is the seductive night club dancer, Josette, whose charms Graham seems unable to resist and plans to spend some time with if and when he gets to Paris. This romantic dalliance adds some complications to his escape plans. Her seedy husband, Jose, seems to make his living by turning a blind eye and pimping her out.
Then there is the seemingly charming German scholar, Dr Fritz Haller, who delights in boring the assembled company with expositions on archaeology and the rather clingy and annoying Turkish tobacco importer, Mr Kuvleti. There is a French married couple, whose political views are the polar opposite of each other’s but are united enough to sit on the same table as the German as a gesture of enmity. Their discourses allow Ambler, a Communist at the time, to take aim at international capitalism.
There is an air of a locked room mystery, a plot mechanism beloved of crime writers of the Golden Age of detective fiction, about the book or, perhaps, more accurately a who will do it, Ambler masterfully wringing out as much tension as possible from seemingly trivial, social engagements and the exchange of niceties. The tension is ramped up a few notches more when the man, whom Graham had spotted at the night club and whom he had subsequently been told was a notorious political assassin, joins the ship.
The final third of the book changes from a tense psychological thriller to an action-packed page turner as the boat docks and Graham tries to escape from the clutches of his assassins. I will not spoil the story save to say that the ending has a somewhat melodramatic twist.
I enjoyed the book immensely and will certainly read some more of Ambler.
July 16, 2019
Error Of The Week (5)
Red faces all round when the Patrouille Suisse were hired to fly over the north-western Swiss town of Lagenbruck to honour the centenary of the death of Swiss aviation pioneer, Oskar Bider, the first man to fly over the Alps in both directions.
The squadron leader, Gunnar Jansen, spotted a marquee and directed his team, the Swiss equivalent of the Red Arrows, to strut their stuff over it. Unfortunately, it was the venue of the 31st Northwest Yodelling Festival in a nearby town, Mumliswil, four miles to the west. Competitors were forced to stop mid-yodel as the noise of the fly past drowned out their efforts.
The assembled crowd and VIPs who had gathered at Lagenbruck for the celebrations were left disappointed. A sheepish Jansen apologised for his error, muttering that one Alpine valley looked pretty much like another. A fair point, I think, but if you specialise in precision flying, you really ought to know where you are going.
